[tti] Negroponte’s $100 laptops
At the end of yesterday’s sessions, Nicholas Negroponte talked briefly about providing millions of $100 laptops to school kids in poor nations, and showed a prototype/mockup. I think it’s a brilliant, world-changing idea, which doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. But here’s a place where hope needs to lead the business plan.
Assume for a moment that it works. Imagine hundreds of millions of kids with networked laptops running linux and using open source applications: The outburst of creativity. The sudden change in social connection. The access via VOIP to the voices around the world. The sudden isolating of Microsoft. And, these puppies don’t come with DRM burned into their circuits.
Negroponte and his colleagues are moving the world forward. The $100 laptop is a platform for emergence. [Technorati tags: negroponte]
Categories: Uncategorized dw
A latpop for every child
Nicholas Negroponte, chairman and founder of MIT’s Media Labs, says he is developing a laptop PC that will go on sale for less than $100 (£53). He told the BBC World Service programme Go Digital he hoped it would become
It will be great if Negroponte can get some funding…
Let me just point to the similarly-motivated and ongoing UBASE project that aims at getting universal free public education for the world’s kids through grade 6:http://www.amacad.org/projects/ubase.aspx
Maybe I’m just a soulless, dried-up husk of a human being, but why is this such a good idea?
Did we not recently read that more people die each year in the regions affected by the tsunami due to a lack of clean drinking water than were killed by the tsunami? Most of them children. Might something like drinking water be a priority? Maybe vaccinations?
What are the environmental implications of a $100.00 laptop? What kind of battery does it use? Is a recycling infrastructure being established as well?
Emergence of what? Forward into what? The future? Nothing to worry about there, as the sign said, “The future begins tomorrow!”
Are there no questions to ask about this idea? Is it something we should just accept and celebrate? Is everything digital by definition, “good?” Is everything “emergent” good?
So, Dave, would you object to the project Betsy points to because clean water and vaccinations are more important than education? Would you object to a program that provided books to school kids? We need to do many things at once.
Is giving kids laptops a good idea? Let me put my opinion this way: Yes, it’s good to give people tools of connection because connection is good, ultimately because we’re in this together.
I agree that it’s not without risk.
Cyber dolls not taking over yet
Just reading an old prediction by Nick Negroponte , the savant and seer currently pushing forward a $100 laptop initiative .
First, education is good. Shoving electronic devices into people’s hands is not, by default, education. Prioritizing education along with clean drinking water, adequate nutrition and healthcare is probably not that difficult. Going off on a quest to create future landfill material is a bit more of a stretch.
“Connection is good.”
“Kowledge is good.”
Welcome to Faber.
What is “connection?” What kinds of connections can be formed? Are all kinds of connections equally good? What is necessary to form a connection? If not all connections are equal, what is necessary to form at least “better” connections, if not the “best.” Will these children have unrestricted access to the internet? What age group are we talking about? How prepared are their parents to monitor what their children find and are exposed to on the internet? How prepared will they be to protect them from the kinds of “connections” predators like to exploit? Will all these connections facilitate education, or will they serve as distractions? The world needs doctors, and engineers (the kind that know how to work with atoms – you know, “real” engineers), and lawyers, not just file sharers and webloggers. How does the introduction of this celebrated “disruptive” technology affect the culture of the communities it is introduced in? How prepared are these cultures to adapt to these connections and preserve what they may value in their culture? Or do we just not care? Not our problem.
How much effort do we put into thinking about the genuine utility and potential unintended consequences of a project, before we indulge ourselves in the much more rewarding and stimulating problem-solving thinking to implement them? How much should we observers think about them before we say they’re a good idea? Is it all just superficial rah-rah, “connection is good” (emergence!) cheering from the sidelines?
Where’s the “self-correcting” nature of the web? I sure hope it’s really good, because we don’t seem terribly interested in, or very good at, avoiding potential mistakes.
Let me be the first to add:
“Spelling is good too.”
Kowledge. Sheesh.
Great questions, Dave.
I assume that parents will be free to confiscate the laptops if they feel they’re corrupting influences. And, as I understand it, these laptops would be provided through national ministries of education, not airdropped by smiling white guys waving from the plane, so if a country feels it’s a bad idea, they won’t do it. But the possibility I think is genuinely exciting and worth rooting for from the sidelines.
Dave R. – did you mean “knowledge” or “college” or “cow ledge” or “no ledge” ? ;-)
$100 laptops for kids on the horizon?
… an ambitious project but seems feasible. Imagine putting a tool like a laptop into millions of kids’ hands, complete with networking capabilities.
Jon, all of the above.
“I meant to do that!”
I like Dave’s questions. It’d be a great thing to *have* $100 laptops that did something useful. I’d like one myself. The hard part of the vision is distribution. Giving $100 *anythings* to an entire population raises questions of basic priorities and equitability. $100 is a lot of money to a big part of the world. In many cases the question might be whether a family would rather have a laptop or a goat. And there’s perhaps an inverse relationship between populations where $100 laptops are of great value (besides my house of course) and governments that could effectively distribute them.
Movable Type ate my info. That was me posting the previous comment.
I’d rather have the goat. But maybe my village would as lief enjoy a goat, fresh drinking water, and a few cheapo laptops.
I hope there’s a sidebar project to distribute mesh cubes and a backhaul to the net with every few dozen laptops. I can just see the cargo cult development of all these communications devices occupying places of pride in families’ homes, unpowered, unconnected.
In a speech by Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, he said there needs to be a “$100 computer” for people in developing countries (Ricciuti, 2004). Nicholas Negropont, founder and chairman of MIT Media Labs, is developing a sub-$100 laptop (Siddle, 2005). Some are predicting a resurgence of network computers (Cooper, 2004), especially since using thin client machines with no hard drives and storing data on the network, drops power consumption by 80% (Gajjar, 2002). These types of computer would probably run different software than the desktops most Americans buy.
Additionally, U.S. customers from many industries have been complaing about software taking more resources and forcing them to upgrade hardware (Gaudin & Nash, 1998). One accounting firm could not buy older versions of an operating system for new PCs, so their entire network was incompatible. The company thought the only solution was a forced upgrade of the operating system. However, by installing software that worked on both old machines and new machines, the company saved money on upgrade fees (McCreesh, 2002).
There are people in developing countries who cannot afford new software which uses a lot of memory, disk space, or energy. There are people in the U.S. who do not want to upgrade their hardware to run new versions software.
If these trends continue, there will be a movement in the software development industry to develop lean software. Generally, “lean software” refers to the process of using as few resources as possible during software construction, similar to lean manufactuing. However, this “lean software” would be engineered with the intent of consuming fewer resources during operation. Initial development costs may increase, but they would be an investment in lower operating costs over the life of the product.
After radio and TV… Now laptops will save the third world.
Yea. Sure, they need to get rid of their subsistence crop, get laptops and junk food instead. And their leaders will run on SUV. I trust the IMF to help on that.
Sane water and food, decent healthcare, literacy, educational books and electricity a few hours a day may come later.
BTW, When you are illiterate. what is the use of a laptop that probably cannot stand too
much heat, cold, humidity, sand and does not run without electricity.
We can’t jumpstart everywhere an economy that we anyway know to be not self sustainable due to lack of earth resources. Get a grasp on reality
Poorer countries may depend on the industrialized nations more than they should (mostly because we have insisted on it), but they are at least as conscious of the currents of modern life as any of us, and in some ways they are more so: they have often seen us demonstrate the results of poor decisions, and they have less illusions about their ability to go it alone. I just spent several weeks in Ecuador. There are much poorer countries, and I didn’t go anywhere a 2WD vehicle wouldn’t take me, but even the smaller towns I visited had at least one cybercafe or telco office with a computer or two available at affordable rates. They are mostly used for e-mail – as often as not, to keep in touch with relatives abroad – but people who are used to coming to town leading a burro or on horseback are quite conscious of the Internet, have a fairly good idea of its features, and expect it to be part of their future, just like more electricity and safer water and food. Nicholas Negroponte has only suggested something that might help in the general project of modernization. I don’t believe he imagines it to be the global solution to attaining the good life. Americans, left, right, and center, have an amusing and exasperating tendency to think the rest of the world is hanging on their decisions (as an ex-Peace Corps Volunteer, that’s one sweeping generalization I feel qualified to make).
Interesting post, interesting comments, and all I can see is a million new script kiddies hacking away on idiot-proof cheap systems… nice!
Johne, thanks for talking some sense.
At the very least, this project, along with the innovative projects we’ve seen to extend wireless networks to rural communities, gives people the power to communicate with each other. This is unequivocally a good thing. It means exchange of ideas can flourish; solutions to common problems of survival can be shared; the possibilities of life can be dramatically expanded.
Just give people more power to connect to each other and they will be able to solve their problems more effectively.
Dear Mr. Sir/Madam,
I belong to Pakistan and I want to introduce $100 Laptop in Pakistan beacause Pakistan is also developing country. So please tell me how can I introduce $100 Laptop in pakistan for shcool kids.
Regards,
Aamir.
I belong to Pakistan and I want to introduce $100 Laptop in Pakistan beacause Pakistan is also developing country. So please tell me how can I introduce $100 Laptop in pakistan for shcool kids.